


So I Sit Here in the Silence

by yourenotfree



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Canon Compliant, I love this character with my whole soul, M/M, Mentions of Substance Abuse, Post-Season/Series 03, Very very briefly - Freeform, and continues as if he doesn't come back right away, but be warned nonetheless, but ends on a hopeful note, i love their love, lots of Mickey trying to figure out his life without Ian, lots of sad mickey, mentions of rape/non-con, my main man Mick, right after Ian takes off for the army, this is sad sad sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 21:55:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14986421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourenotfree/pseuds/yourenotfree
Summary: Mickey thinks about Ian all the time.





	So I Sit Here in the Silence

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this so damn fast I can't believe how much I missed writing these two. 
> 
> I am working on completing my chaptered work!! I did not give up! Next part coming VERY soon. 
> 
> I hope this ends up being worth a read :)

Mickey thinks about Ian all the time.

He thinks about where he is, and what he’s doing, and who he’s doing it with. He thinks about what he’s eating for breakfast, and who he’s telling his stupid jokes to, and if he’s happier now that he’s left this shithole behind. If he’s happy.

He’s the first thing on Mickey’s mind when he wakes up in the morning, and the last thought in his head before he falls asleep at night.

He sees flashes of red everywhere he goes. In faces on the street, in dark, smoky bars through a drunken haze. In the freckles splashed across the face of the first guy he fucks after Ian leaves for good.

Mickey doesn’t cry. Mandy does. He hears her, back pressed up against her locked door, listening to the desperate, wet sounds and feeling each sob like a knife to the chest.

They don’t talk about it, about what she heard at the wedding, about how much it’s affecting them both. They don’t talk about Ian, period. Even so, Mickey can feel the anger radiating off of his sister, can almost _see_ it rising from her skin like little tendrils of fire. Her glares follow him everywhere he goes, black and unforgiving and not altogether undeserved.

Svetlana watches him too, one hand wrapped protectively around her enormous, pregnant belly. She watches him pace restlessly around the house, watches him smoke by the window in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep for the nightmares. She says nothing, just purses her lips, narrows her eyes, and silently loathes him.

He understands. He fucking hates himself, too.

The days turn into weeks. The weeks become months. The snow falls, and then it melts again. The sun shines, too bright and too blinding, but Mickey feels the cold down in his bones.

He wakes up one night, panting and sweating and on the verge of tears, suddenly terrified that he can’t remember what Ian looks like. Still trembling, he trips into the bathroom, flipping on every light in the house as he goes, and digs through twelve different magazines before he finds the right one.

The second his fingers brush up against the torn and wrinkled photograph, he feels calmer. It’s like a shot of nicotine, straight into his veins. When the fuck did Ian Gallagher become his drug of choice?

He jams the picture into the mirror and stares at it until he gets hard. It’s not the first time he’s got off like this, fast and rough and with the start of tears pricking uncomfortably in his eyes, and it’s certainly not the last.

When he returns to his room, Svetlana is sitting up in bed, dark eyes cold and knowing. Her eyes travel south, until they rest on his crotch. Her mouth curls into a cold, terrible smirk. Mickey averts his eyes. He sleeps on the couch that night.

Sometimes Mickey starts walking, and ends up standing outside the Kash ’N’ Grab, wondering what the fuck he’s doing. Linda notices him staring. He doesn’t move, even when he watches her step outside the store, hands on hips, frown in place.

“You can’t steal from a place you used to work, Milkovich,” she says, raising a defiant eyebrow at him. “Even you wouldn’t sink that low.”

Linda always did have bigger balls than Kash.

“Not stealin’,” he tells her, sort of irritated that she _still_ thinks he’s the same asshole kid who took the gun off Kash so many years ago. “Fuckin’ relax.”

She’s studies him in silence for a long minute, and relaxes her aggressive stance. Her eyes soften considerably. “You’re really sort of pathetic, huh?”

Mickey bristles. “ _Excuse_ me?”

She jerks her head backwards, towards the store. “You miss him, right? That’s why you’re here. You’re trying to find some of part of him.” She chuckles quietly. “I get it. I sort of miss the little shit, too. Husband-fucking aside.”

Mickey doesn’t have the energy to pretend, not with Linda, who probably has plenty of video evidence to back her up. He meets her eyes, shrugs. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s not here. Not even close.”

Linda shakes her head. “He’s gone.”

Mickey runs all the way home. He stops to vomit blood and cheap whiskey in the dark of some random alley. There’s a blood drop on the leg of his jeans when he’s done. He burns them in the yard that night.

He’s in a bar when it happens. Not the Alibi Room—too many familiar faces, and too much of Kev’s stupid, pitiful eyes watching his every move. It’s some other place (he forgets the name), somewhere darker and rougher, with bloodstains soaked permanently into the carpet and a hole punched clean through the drywall.

He’s just about to take his eighth shot of the night, when his phone starts ringing in his pocket. He pulls it out, looks at the name through bleary, uncertain eyes, and presses it to his ear. “What,” he says, aiming for intimidating, but slurring so badly he wonders if it even comes out as a word.

“She had the kid,” comes Mandy’s voice, the first words she’s spoken to him in months.

“What?” Mickey repeats. His head is throbbing something awful. He wants to lay down. He wants to never get up.

“Svet. She went into labor a few hours ago, and the kid just popped out. It’s a boy.”

Mickey hangs up. He dumps his phone into the trash.

His mind goes to Ian, as it always does. Ian, who loved kids, who fucking wept with joy whenever his youngest brother managed to spit out his name, would’ve had something encouraging to say about all this. He would’ve turned this shit, this awful, unspeakable thing that happened to them both, into something worth celebrating.

That kid, and his _damn_ optimism. Mickey wonders if he managed to finally beat it out of him.

It takes him three full days before he drags himself home. He slams the front door shut behind himself, and a second later, a furious Russian appears, cradling a screaming bundle of blankets and pink skin in her arms. She snaps something that Mickey can’t hear over all the wailing. He ignores her, pushes past her, and throws himself down on his own bed. He presses both hands over his ears, as tight as he can.

He never touches the thing, can barely stand to look at it. Every time Svetlana tries to pass the baby off to him, Mickey snarls a swear at her, and leaves the room. Eventually, she stops trying.

He was never supposed to go through this _alone_. He doesn’t know the first fucking thing about being a dad. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t even have one.

Mickey moves permanently onto the couch when Svetlana insists on moving the cradle into his room. Their room. Whatever. He considers asking Mandy if he can share with her, like they used to do when they were kids, waiting out one of Terry’s drunken rampages, but she still won’t even look him in the eye.

It’s worse in the living room. Ian haunts his dreams, every single one. Every time Mickey’s body finally succumbs to sleep, green eyes and an easy grin are there, waiting patiently for him.

The months turn into a year.

Mickey runs into Fiona in the grocery store, his arms full of diapers and formula. For some reason, it makes him feel ashamed. He tries to get past her, tries to make a break for the register without her noticing him, but the girl’s got eyes like a fucking hawk.

“Mickey,” she calls out, stopping him in his tracks. She glances at his purchases with some interest. “I heard your wife was pregnant. Boy or girl?”

He doesn’t understand why she’s asking, or why she cares either way. As far as he knows, Lip’s the only Gallagher who’s got a clue about him and Ian.

“Boy,” he says after a minute. He shuffles his feet, tries to come up with the fastest possible exit strategy.

“Hey,” Fiona says, like she’s just remembered something. “You heard anything from Ian? I know you guys used to work together. You were friends right? Maybe he said something to you about where he was heading?”

She looks so hopeful. It makes Mickey’s throat constrict. He shakes his head, and stares at the floor. “Nah. We weren’t that close. No idea where he fucked off to.”

It’s not his place to rat Ian out to his surrogate mother. The kid wanted out. He wanted to be free of this poisonous fucking neighborhood. Mickey can’t find it in himself to blame him for that.

“Oh,” he hears her say, and he doesn’t have to look up to know what her face looks like right now. He sees it everyday, when he works up the courage to look in the mirror. “Well, thanks anyway. Congrats on your baby.”

Maybe Ian’s _never_ coming back. He’d said four years, that shitty day when Mickey couldn’t force anything out, other than one, pathetic don’t. But maybe four years would come and go, and Ian would have a whole other life somewhere else.

Mickey thinks about that sometimes, when he’s high out of his mind and so sad that it makes his stomach ache. He thinks about Ian falling in love, and getting married in some lavish, white wedding. He imagines Ian’s arms full of babies, his eyes shining with happiness. And that’s the part that always stays the same, no matter what he’s imagining at the time; he always pictures Ian _happy_.

Terry gets thrown in jail again, this time for good. Every time the phone rings, Mickey hopes it’s someone calling to tell him that his dad’s been stabbed to death by some Good Samaritan.

The kid keeps growing, like a goddamn weed. Svetlana parades him around the house like a trophy, cooing at him in Russian, and cuddling him against her chest. Even Mandy can’t seem to resist his round cheeks and bright blue eyes. Mickey tries not to look.

Mandy comes around last, but she _does_ come around. She throws herself down on the couch beside him one morning, hair like a tumbleweed atop her head, and her breath already filled with smoke. She offers him her cigarette, and looks straight at him for the first time in so, so long.

He doesn’t take it at first, just stares at her, still blinking the sleep from his eyes. Mandy raises a brow, shakes the smoke in his face, and says, “Well?”

Mickey grabs for it blindly, and puts it up to his lips. He takes a long drag, and breathes in deeply. He hands it back without ceremony.

“Your kid’s fucking cute, Mick. Don’t know how you managed that with _your_ ugly mug.”

Mickey barks out a half-laugh that surprises even him. It feels good to laugh, so good that he does it again. And then, suddenly, he can’t stop. He’s doubled over, head almost in Mandy’s lap, laughing and laughing until tears are leaking out of his eyes, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to stop.

Mandy watches him, cigarette forgotten and burning down to the filter. When he can finally breathe again, he meets her gaze and smiles. “Shit. _Shit_.”

She looks at him, expressionless. Finally, she faces the window in front of them, and flicks the ruined cigarette onto the coffee table. She takes a deep breath, and exhales slowly. “Ian would’ve loved that kid,” she says, quiet but firm. “He looks just like you.”

Mickey’s so surprised, his jaw falls open. She hasn’t so much as mentioned Ian’s name in a year, and now this. It’s almost a relief. “I know,” he says, because he really, really does.

It gets easier after that. Knowing that he’s got Mandy back on his side makes Mickey feel much more inclined to come home. She sits right next to him, and holds Yevgeny on her lap. Mickey looks at this kid—at his _son_ —and tries to find the parts that came from him. The eyes are obvious, and the mouth is the same. Mickey thinks he’s destined to be a little shit-starter, just like his father.

He still thinks about Ian all the time. He still freezes on his way to the Alibi, sure he’s just spotted a lazy smirk and sparkling green eyes on a passing stranger. His heart still stops every time his phone chimes. He still dreams in _red_.

He still looks, everywhere he goes, holding out hope that Ian’ll come walking up the road any day now. Mickey wants to be ready when he does. He has a whole fucking laundry list of things he wants to say. The words burn his throat with their desperation to _get_ _out_. He practices them at night, when no one is awake to hear. He says them over and over into a closed fist, whispers them into the mirror. Thinks them so often he wonders if Ian’s getting any of this telepathically.

But the days are getting easier. Terry _does_ end up bleeding to death in prison, so at least something in Mickey’s life is actively going to plan. And he’s sort of getting used to Yev and all the baby shit around the house. He’s even starting to get along with Svetlana, who long ago stopped trying to slit his throat in his sleep. She’s really not all that bad. And she loves the fuck out of their kid.

So far, Mickey hasn’t ended up dead, or incarcerated. He figures that’s a pretty good start. He’s got no fucking clue what comes next. But he thinks he might be ready for it, whatever it ends up being.

He thinks about Ian all the time. He always, _always_ will. It hurts less. Mickey smiles more.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, my lovelies!! Leave a comment or kudo if you're feeling generous. Love to everyone!


End file.
